What's the fun of fulfilling expectations, anyway? Since everyone else is using the date of 1 January to look forward, I thought I'd do the very definition of a 180 and look back in the opposite direction, knowing I'll end up revealing just as much about myself but in my usual thoroughly underhanded manner.

So let's look backwards, to the day of my birth.

I know that several of my friends find astrology fascinating or deeply meaningful. I greet it with a healthy dose of skepticism—was the ephemera of my personality cemented into an ever-fixéd mark from the moment the obstetrician set my mother's C-section date? I don't know. It's the eternal question of destiny and free will. What is 'me'? Are personalities fluid or rigid constructs? Can we, fundamentally, change? Or do we spend our entire lives becoming what we were meant to be all along?

(And if that's the case, who chooses the meaning and can I have this entity over for dinner? Should it exist, I have questions for it.)

Nevertheless.

So this, according to the stars, is me: (click the photo below for a larger version)

Birth chart, Amy
by domesticat.

I've gotten odd reactions to that chart in the past, but only recently asked some friends why. It was explained to me that such a chart is an exercise in diametric opposites: a sign that ostensibly indicates a person of balance, order, and logic (Libra) being whacked over the head by lots of things pointing toward passion, intensity, and impetuousness.

I am apparently astrally schizophrenic.

I should consider blaming it all on the stars.

(Has anyone seen my to-do list? I don't know whether I should cuddle it or scare it.)